Authors

Richard Price

Biography

Richard Price was born in 1966. His father was a manager in the construction industry, first with Laing and then at the Scottish Special Housing Association. The Association was said to be the largest builder of council homes in Europe: it was aggressively dismantled in the early years of the Thatcher government, when Price's father was made redundant. Price's mother worked at home, raising four sons. She had attended art college in Kent in her teens and managed, sometimes, to find time to paint for pleasure.

At the age of seventeen Price trained as a journalist at Napier College, Edinburgh. He then studied English and Librarianship at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. In 1988 he moved to London to work at the British Library, completing in his spare time a PhD concerning the novelist Neil Gunn's political and aesthetic response to the tragic. For many years Price was a curator at the British Library and then the head of the curatorial department Modern British Collections. This section later disappeared in an internal reorganisation: while there he curated Migrant and the Possibility of Poetry, an exhibition which highlighted Gael Turnbull's role in the American, Scottish and English networks which primed and catalysed the British Poetry Revival of the 1960s and 70s (and the parallel re-emergence of the artist book in the UK). He also co-developed and judged the Michael Marks Pamphlet Awards, attempting to re-set and widen the aesthetic terms of poetry's reception within the conventional prize infrastructure. He is currently a senior manager in a strategy unit at the Library.

In the 1990s Price had been associated with the group of poets the Informationists, coining the name. It remains one of the few UK groupings since the Second World War to name and identify itself collectively, to establish its own publishing and reviewing network (for example, via such magazines as Verse and Gairfish) and to publish a group anthology with manifestos (Contraflow on the SuperHighway, 1994) . Aiming to import more 'non-poetic' ideas into poetry and to challenge the hierarchies inscribed in the language of political systems (including academia), Informationism can be seen in part as continuing the late modernist and social programme of the poet Edwin Morgan.

At this time Price co-edited Gairfish, Verse, and Southfields, and co-founded Vennel Press, which published early books by David Kinloch, Elizabeth James, W. N. Herbert, Donny O'Rourke, Peter McCarey and others. He now edits the little magazine Painted, spoken.

His collections include Lucky Day, Greenfields, and Rays, and as R. J. Price he has published a novel, The Island. His collection Small World (Carcanet, 2012) won the SMIT Scottish Book of the Year Award in the poetry category. In 2013 he was European Poet in Residence at the University of Coimbra, Portugal.

Recurrent themes in his work include the complex nature of disability (in large part a result of his experience as a father whose daughter, Katie, has Angelman's Syndrome); and the relationship between intelligence, the lyric (in song and in poetry) and love. His work ranges across a large stylistic and tonal spectrum but he has positioned himself as "a writer of modern lyric poetry in the sense, say, that Denise Riley or Kelvin Corcoran, I believe, are."

He often works with artists in other media, including Simon Lewandowski (digital and conceptual), Karen Bleitz, Ron King, and Julie Johnstone (artist's books), David Annand (sculpture), and Caroline Trettine and Ian Kearey (music). His website is hydrohotel.net, where Painted, spoken is available in digital form and where Price's literary criticism is collected.

"Lucky Day by Richard Price is a felicitous gathering of Richard Price's unusual, poignant and funny poetry, which has been appearing in chapbooks, magazines and beautiful small-press volumes for more than a decade. They are clear, witty, intelligent, versatile and often highly moving; superb examples of a hardearned surface simplicity conveying oceanic depths of feeling and thought." (Robert Potts, The Guardian)

"The play of these poems is moving and yet linguistically challenging. The sense of innocent nursery rhyme and the hard-ended reality of the situation create a unique poetry - even a new modernism. Price has given late modernism an injection of humanity it has long required." (John Kinsella, The Manhattan Review, on Lucky Day)

"Price was one of the so-called Informationists. Their agenda, broadly, involved reclaiming the various specialist lexicons and syntaxes - scientific, commercial, political and technological - and finding metaphor under mere data. In Price's case this is often achieved by juxtaposition with 'traditional' verse forms, such as lullabies, nursery rhymes and songs, in a manner reminiscent of the late Veronica Forrest-Thomson. For example, one sub-section of the book is entitled 'Marks and Sparks': the nickmame of a high street store is transformed into a meditation on the thrills and bruises of love. This may sound academic, but consider the height of this collection, the 'Hand Held' sequence. Confessional poetry can be slightly manipulative; however, these poems are not splurges of unedited emotion, but honed and sophisticated objects. They range from the brutally frank ('People will not love you / when we are dead') to hard-won epiphanies ('whatever your clear eyes are meaning / you mean it brightly'). Those who think contemporary poetry is a parlour-game for pseuds ought to read this astonishingly moving, filigree-fine book." (S. B. Kelly, The Sunday Herald, on Lucky Day)